Help me see the status messages

By Adam Cogan in Teams 0 Comment

Sometimes you see a message like this:

3 or more members are out of the office or have a status message

Unfortunately it is not immediately obvious where to read them. 

Currently you can open the top-right-hand pane, then from there hover over the people’s icons and see their status.

I have a suggestion that could remove this papercut by adding a button called “View” straight from the message we see.

Figure: “View” link opens panel

Have separated folders for a Team “chat” files and Team “project” files

By Tiago Araujo in Teams 0 Comment

Currently, any images or documents shared in a Team chat conversation will automatically be in the “Files” folder. These files are often temporary.

The “Files” folder should have only permanent files that are relevant to the project.

Figure: Bad example – Files with different purposes are mixed in the same folder (tab). In blue we see conversation images; in red we have the project files

We believe chat images should go into a separated “Conversations” folder, so we have 2 folders (tabs):

  • Conversations: files from chat (mostly temporary)
  • Files: files manually added as a resource to the project (mostly permanent)

Help me switching devices nicer + security issue

By Adam Cogan in Teams 0 Comment

I add people into Teams calls all the time and I switch devices during group calls often. No problems.

There is a problem on an individual call and I believe there is a nasty scenario that the other person experiences when I change devices. The other person accepts the new call from me and then they have a:

  • Phantom call – this new call is going on fine, but they are seeing the call on hold call 
  • I then typically hang up from the old device (that says on hold) and now they can hear me but see nothing else reflecting on their side. This is a security risk. If I was to go on mute and just listen the other party would not know!

Suggestion #1:

…Right now I am in a call (with a person called Jernej K) and the Teams | Calls list does not reflect my current call… it would be handy to show that person at the top eg.
        Jernej K
       (your current call)

Figure: Missing my current call

Suggestion #2: 

…For this current example, when I call him from another device (say my current ipad battery is low or the camera is temporarily not working until a reboot) it would be good to clean up the current experience.

Currently he receives another call from me and answers it like normal.

Figure: This would be better if this call did not need to happen

Then he sees the existing call is ‘On hold’ (but he can hear me fine).

Figure: Both ends see the call as ‘On hold’

On my end I see the current call… and the old device has that call ‘On hold’ so I naturally hang up the call from the original device (eg. iPad with low battery), the ‘On hold’ call disappears on the other’s side and the call is still active.

When this happens, he can’t see the call and there is no visual indication for it (eg. if I was to go mute, I can hear him but he doesn’t know he’s still on a call). 💥

Note #1: *IMPORTANT* His current status in a Teams is showing as “In a call” instead of “In a meeting” (so there is a way he could detect the phantom call).

Note #2: I was using 3 iOS devices and a Surface Laptop and the other person (Jernej K) was using a PC (Windows Desktop client). We were able to replicate this every single time in various setups.

Help me to fix mistakes in responses

By Tiago Araujo in Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

I love using Microsoft Forms and in the end, reviewing the answers is fun. Suggestions to make it even better:

  1. As the administrator, add the functionality to edit fields that are incorrect.
    For example here the user was accidentally logged in as “SVC_Dash” instead of “Greg”… 
  2. Of course, there should be history, if you want to round out the feature.
  3. And the most simple improvement would be to make the UX clearer. In this case, the current user is shown, but it is too subtle and users that have made the below mistake, did not know they had not logged out of their non-primary account.

I’d love know if others would like this feature too…

Figure: Allow me to edit a mistake on https://forms.office.com/Pages/DesignPage.aspx

Help me have a better experience with Teams | NDI (#1 Reliability, #2 Watermark)

By Adam Cogan in Teams 0 Comment

I’d like to talk about this new feature … aka Network Device Interface for video recordings.

At SSW we have 3 guys who run SSW TV (a youtube channel for .NET and Azure devs) so we are all excited about the new NDI feature – this was released in Microsoft Teams a week ago (September 2020).

We also run 6 .NET + Azure User Groups around Australia and China and it has been really hard during COVID-19 to run these live. We have been pre-recording the sessions and then pretending they are live and it has worked. That said, it is not at all the same as a live event.

Therefore I am certain NDI It is going to help us so much. I want to share our first experience from our first live event using NDI. We were able to run a free event with 5 speakers and it went well from my side. Afterwards this was sent to me from one of the SSW TV engineers who ran the event using the new NDI feature of Teams.

From: Raj

Hi Adam

The experience was mixed. When it works the feature allows me to really pull off a broadcast level show (without very expensive specialist hardware).

You can see below the multi view and picture in picture (of 5 speakers) that I was able to create. Each person on the call is an individual input much like a normal camera, so I’m able to do the same things as if I had a real in-studio multi-camera setup (like you would see on the news or big broadcast shows).

Figure: This live mix is amazing and was easy to make. I got this all working in 20 minutes (and most of that was in photoshop)

So in theory this should be excellent, but there are some issues that are essentially deal-breakers.

Firstly, the general reliability. In the image below you can see one of the sources has changed from the person’s camera to a Teams logo. This must be a Teams bug.

For some reason the input randomly does this with some people and not others. It happened during our stream with the screenshare input (a big deal this is the most important thing I want to output).

In other tests, this hasn’t happened at all, so it seems to be random. It can’t be blamed on networking issues because technically the NDI output is still active, because if it wasn’t, you’d be seeing a black screen.

Figure: Bug – live stream mixer

Secondly, I love that I can bring in the screen share as its own source, as I can do lots of funky looking things like the picture in picture. However, my second issue is to do with the screen sharing output. That massive Microsoft logo watermark in the top right is extremely intrusive and ruins the shot. For some reason, it only appears over the screen share output, which makes no sense to me since the majority of screen shares will be Windows-based machines where their branding is clearly visible. This is completely unnecessary and ruins what is otherwise a super useful feature of Teams.

I’ve googled and I’m not alone in thinking this: https://i.reddit.com/r/VIDEOENGINEERING/comments/ikmr85/ms_teams_ndi_watermark/

         > Teams released an update with NDI integration. I’m finding that in a scheduled teams meeting, there’s a god awful watermark in upper right corner over NDI

This will need to be fixed in order for us to use this. It’s not just distracting, it’s actually ruining the user experience because it covers the content (e.g. Visual Studio coding and PowerPoints etc.).
SSW is an enterprise customer and this just seems entirely unnecessary. Even if it’s an extra charge, the option should be there to remove it.

Figure: Top right – terrible watermark size and placement. It is the opposite of subtle

I hope this helps and I hope it gets better.

Raj Dhatt
SSW TV Engineer